


two sides to every creation (you and me, we're no revelation)

by Choices_We_Make, questionsthemselves



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aftermath, Angst and Feels, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, War is hell, We're all prisoners of war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 13:25:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11990730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Choices_We_Make/pseuds/Choices_We_Make, https://archiveofourown.org/users/questionsthemselves/pseuds/questionsthemselves
Summary: Somewhere along the line, we ceased to be school rivals. Suddenly, we were just pawns, and the game wasn't a game anymore.We were legacies. Falling apart in broom closets and bathroom stalls, trapped in the legends of our names.It’s funny, in a bitter sort of way, how now both vanquisher and vanquished are united in their suffering. The victor and the defeated both wake up screaming.Past, present, and future…a dialogue of sorts.





	1. Part The First - past

 

We were school rivals. I sometimes wonder if we would have stayed just that, had things been different. Petty, malicious, sneering and turning our heads the other way, each with our little following, our juvenile grudges. We were pushy, full of insecurities and naive simplicity, and thought we were bigger than the world. 

My jeans and hoodies, scraggly ruffian look, quick temper, and impulsive bravery. You, with your pristine pale features, aristocratic bearing, haughty lips and bloodline pride. Me - an orphan and castaway. You - a doted on only child. An outsider rebel and an insider to a dark society wrapped in secrecy. 

We both belonged above the crowd, projected the persona people wanted to see. Both forced to live with the molded weight of expectations...our destinies. Content with our paltry schoolboy feuding, we were nevertheless forced to unwanted extremes. Play areas became battlegrounds, and lessons, sparring matches. Our words were our weapons, but they weren't enough. 

War was waged in the school corridors. We wanted fist fights and mean-spirited practical jokes, cutting sarcastic banter and gloating upper-hands. The war gave us death, and torture, gave us heavy guilt and panicked split-second choices. 

It gave us us darkness and heaviness, scream-inducing nightmares and clawing for survival, choose-us-or-choose-them mentality, loved ones or strangers, pushed us to the brink of an uncrossable divide. The war forced us from school rivals to arch enemies, neither of us wanting the roles we played and neither of us feeling we had a choice. 

Our destinies. 

You were marked for darkness. I, to fight against it. We had few ways to channel our burning frustration, our simmering anger at our authority figures, at people, at the war, so we used each other as outlets for the violence we felt – not ever realizing how similar we were. 

I screamed into the sky, let loose through hurtling air. You let silent tears trail in a dusty room by an old wardrobe. Our hands shook holding our wands. We were left with the choice of murder or unthinkable consequences. 

We were the weapons of a new generation, puppets for a bitterness carried from another age, defined by the choices our families made before us. We both knew what we had to stand for the moment we entered the wizarding world - figureheads left over from a war that wasn't ours. 

I had to die for my cause. You had to kill for it. 

Somewhere along the line, we ceased to be school rivals. Suddenly, we were just pawns, and the game wasn't a game anymore.

You might have wanted to punch my face in, but instead got to see me tortured and degraded, wanting death - but never begging for it. Never begging. 

I was relentless in my mockery of your position, but froze when faced with you on a cold stone floor, bleeding out in a hundred different places, water and red pooled around your pale white, eyes torn with anguish.

We never wanted any of that. 

The realness of it spoiled our shallow judgements, our superior contempt and easy ridicule. We wrestled with being seventeen, with life and indecision, with love and honor and bravery and the meaning of these words we throw around, like family or right thing to do. We did what we needed to do to survive, and rationalized our decisions after. 

I hid my numbness behind reckless emotion - you hid your emotion behind your facade. I despised a fame that put me places I didn't want to be - you coveted a fame that would take you where you wanted to go. 

We were legacies. Falling apart in broom closets and bathroom stalls. Trapped in the legends of our names. We were children. We were used. 

But I wonder, were we really opposites?

Or only two sides to the same coin?


	2. present

It’s quiet now, in this godforsaken mansion. Not the quiet of sunshine on limestone and dusty drapes, the quiet that throbs with the echo of blood as it hits the floor. You inherited the old Black house, I’m sure you know what that sounds like. 

I haven’t left the grounds in days, haven’t left the house since spring turned over to summer. I want the weather outside to be as cold as the ashes of everyone we had to bury, but it’s hatefully, blazingly hot. Hot like fire, the fire you saved me from and I still don’t have a fucking clue why you did that. 

Wouldn’t it have been easier to let it end that way, you rising out of the flames and me consumed by them? 

There’s a dull sort of comfort, in knowing with certainty your own breaking point. Most people never get that. Lucky me, huh? You never broke though, did you. You walked firm, face blazing with the kind of conviction I’ve never had, right up to stare straight into death’s face and didn’t flinch.

Even now, every time I pick up a paper I see you standing there, still not flinching, even with the flash of cameras going off inches from your face. They want you to be an Auror, maybe even the Minister someday. 

That’s what father wanted me to be, Minister. All my life it’s been about what my father wanted me to be, what the world expected me to be, and I don’t know how to go on without that. 

I’ve lived my life in opposition to you, playing up to our roles as two faces of a war we never wanted and now suddenly that’s gone. You’ve risen, and I’m left down here, alone except the skeletal shadows of who my parents once were.

I’ve lost a family, you’ve gained one. My purpose has been ripped away, you’ve been given a new one. You’re preparing for a future while I’m stuck in a ghostly limbo of my own making. 

Except, like everything in our lives, it’s never that simple is it? 

The grubbing reporters clutching at your cloak strings might not see the shadows under your eyes, but I do. Your hands squeeze the pens a little too tight as you give them the autographs they beg for, ragged nails bitten down to the quick. 

You dress every day like you’re ready to go on the run, sturdy practical things with patches reenforcing the elbows, all well-worn wool and leather - never the softness of cambric or silk, just to feel the comfort of it on your skin. 

I see the way you stiffen whenever anyone touches you, like it takes everything you have not to push them away. See, I don’t even bother not pushing them away anymore.

It’s funny, in a bitter sort of way, how now both vanquisher and vanquished are united in their suffering. The victor and the defeated both wake up screaming. _We_ both wake up screaming. I wish to Merlin I could have one night, where I don’t wake up screaming. 

They tell me the war is over now, and out there maybe it is, but for us… for us it never will be.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love, let us know what you think!


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